Google takes on Slack by splitting Hangouts in half

Lorraine Burke

As for Hangouts Chat, it's a bit like Google's take on Slack. Hangouts Chat is a free service that comes as part of your G Suite subscription and is meant to help Google better appeal up market at the enterprise. There's a renewed emphasis on Hangouts being a business tool now, too, with support for dozens of attendees and easy joining via Google Calendar invitations.

Get Data Sheet, Fortune's technology newsletter. It also sports a clean and minimal design which looks rather pleasing to use already.

But the company still faces many challenges. As a result, it has somewhere between 1 and 5 billion downloads on the Play Store. Register now using the code NOJITTER to receive $300 off an Entire Event or Tue-Thu Conference pass, or a free Expo Plus pass. To try out Hangouts Chat, G Suite customers can apply to participate in an early adopter program.

Cisco (csco), Atlassian (team), and Slack also sell similar tools. Imagine if SuperCell made a new version of Clash of Clans every few months and launched a new app instead of simply updating the old one - probably wouldn't garner almost as much attention or user investment. The Hangouts Chat app comes with multiple "rooms" for each topic of discussion, along with threaded conversations and integration with other G Suite Services.

Hangouts Chat is, as you'd expect from the name, the text messaging chunk of Hangouts.

The Meet is mostly about collaboration and needless to say it offers video chatting functionality. You can also call upon bots in these rooms. These tasks include scheduling meetings based on when people's respective calendars show they're available. The company on Thursday at Google Cloud's Next conferenceannounced that it is doing some major tweaks in the Hangouts.

According to tech experts, the new look and features make Google's Hangouts Chat a lot like Microsoft's Slack.

Hangouts is now getting an overhaul that turns the service into a more powerful Slack-competitor. The service will work without any plugins and Google has attested to the fact that it wont be particularly heavy on your battery life.

Google Next '17 Google hopes to further invade the worlds of teleconference and business chat with a set of new offerings. Additionally, Google said recently that it would stop supporting its Spaces messaging app that it debuted in May. However, each to his own and this approach appears to be working just as well. While it has recently stopped becoming a default pack-in app, Hangouts (formerly Google Talk) was a pack-in app for almost all of Android's lifetime. When the company has a new idea on the communications front, rather than build it into an existing app as an additional feature it usually just launches a whole new app. Google has partnered with Box for Hangouts Chat, allowing customers to share content like documents and other files easier and more securely.

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